Snow days in NoVA
There was a snowstorm last weekend, if you haven’t heard. Lots of snow on Sunday, then a lot of sleet on Monday. It was a mess.
Northern Virginia—and the entire DC area—has a tough time with snowstorms.
Politically, we are in the worst possible snow latitude. Far enough north that we get snow each year and a significant storm every couple of years, but not far enough north to make it worthwhile to commit the money and resources to effectively deal with it.
Consequently, storms that would be plowed ASAP and not even close the schools or interrupt work commutes in Upstate NY or New England end up shutting things down here for days.1
Even conditional on that, the schools around here drive me absolutely insane. The roads have been completely fine since Wednesday 1/28, and my kids’ schools (FCPS) are going to be closed tomorrow, 2/2. This makes absolutely no sense.
The schools’ explanation is that “the challenge continues to be snow piles and ice on sidewalks and bus stops (we have 45,000 bus stops!) that have proven difficult to remove.” [emphasis mine]. Remember, the roads are fine. We are closing the schools because of snowbanks and icy sidewalks.
That’s ridiculous. You can definitely wait for a bus and get to school in those conditions. Kids across the upper north do this every day, right now. The snowbanks were piled up every winter in my town growing up, and we didn’t even have sidewalks. It would never have crossed anyone’s mind to close the schools. Then or now.
More importantly, the snow in NoVA isn’t melting anytime soon. We’re in a serious cold snap right now and, if you follow the FCPS logic, the schools may not be open all week.
There’s actually an easy way to deal with snowbanks that aren’t going to melt until March. It’s how everyone in the upper Midwest and Upstate NY deals with it: you just go on with your life. It’s a snowbank, not a grizzly. Tell your kids not to play on top of them while they wait for the bus.
It’s totally reasonable to say “Crap, I hate these snowbanks, February sucks.” What’s beyond stupid is to say “Crap, I hate these snowbanks, we should close the schools for two weeks.”
I have no idea how much of this is tied to (a) the COVID closures, and (b) the contemporary culture of public school administration, both of which seem to have ushered in a new era of extremely risk-averse decision-making about opening the schools. But the cost-benefit here seems way off, and the other side of the equation is lost instructional time.
Two additional factors complicated this. One is that thee are lots of people in NoVA who are originally from places where it never snows, and some of them are terrified of driving in snow, many of them are overly worried about it, and a lot of them are terrible at it. Second, the mid-Atlantic has the problem of re-freezes, where the snow melts during the day and then freezes back to ice on the roads at night. That’s a legit problem, and something I never really encountered Upstate. The roads can be fine here 2 days after the storm, and then icy as hell that next day. (This is not the current situation, the roads are fine).↩